Tackling Baby Scale Anxiety

Your baby's weight is no-one else's business

“Just pop her on the scales for me,” said the midwife. Or was it the health visitor? We saw so many professionals in the first few weeks with our eldest, that I honestly don’t remember.

We both watched the digital numbers flicker and dance as our screaming baby daughter lay on the scales. I’d been there through each breastfeed, day or night, logging the length of each one, making sure we hit the upper end of the recommended eight to twelve feeds a day. I even note which breast she feeds off first. We were min-maxing this shit, but it didn’t matter unless that number on those scales was higher than the last time. A hundred grams higher, to be exact. That’s what they should be putting on every week, apparently.

The number stopped. I saw my wife’s face drop, just as our baby’s weight had. Only a tiny bit, but it was enough to keep us worrying about our daughter’s weight for another week at least.

Over time, our daughter put on the weight she’d lost at birth and was back on her trajectory. But that’s just the thing; they all put the birth weight back on. Barring a genuine medical concern that requires intervention, they all get back on track.

I still remember walking out of the clinic that day, just having gotten over the anxiety about the weigh-in and now building it all up again for another one in two days time when the midwife comes to visit our house.

We were both gutted, but I know this is personal for my wife. She was distraught, feeling worried and guilty that she’s not doing a good enough job breastfeeding. This got me frustrated on her behalf; I saw just how much she was pouring into giving life to our first born child, and some numbers on a scale get to invalidate all that? Fuck that.

I said to my wife, “why the fuck do they need to weigh her so much anyway?”

Well, as triggering as the whole ordeal can be, it turns out that there’s some very good reasons for it.

Weight is pretty much a healthcare provider’s number one signifier of any potential issues with a baby’s early growth and development. In the UK, babies’ weights are measured against percentiles developed by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, by measuring the weights of thousands of full-term babies born between 1997 and 2003 across six different countries. This dataset gives health professionals a pretty good idea of when a baby in their care is developing and growing as expected, and where more support may be needed, whether that be with feeding or, in rare cases, admission into hospital.

So there’s my heat-of-the-moment question well and truly answered. Fair enough, I guess. Weights need to be taken by those in the know, and recorded for medical purposes.

But beyond that, I don’t see any reason whatsoever why anyone else should be privy to the details of a baby’s weight…and yet it seems like it’s something that many people are desperate to pry into with new parents, first-timers especially.

It starts with the outdated notion that heavier babies are somehow healthier or “better” than the rest, or that you’re more of a warrior if you’ve pushed out a ten-pound baby compared to a seven-pounder.

Somewhere in all this, parents got sick of being asked by everyone they encountered, and so just started announcing it, firstly whenever they walked into the room with the baby for the first time, and then later in their social media “welcome to the world” posts.

I’m not having a go at parents who do this—I am one. At least for me and many others, it’s not bragging or attention-seeking, but rather a defence mechanism for when you get the same old comments from people who should know better, like “he’s so tiny!” or “she doesn’t look eight pounds!”. We got the latter one a lot. Like, what do you want me to do, carry around my fucking bathroom scales just to prove you wrong?

A combination of comparing the weight of your baby to others on social media, the thoughtless comments of others, and the race for your baby to recover the 10% of weight they commonly lose after birth feeds a lot of parental anxiety, at a time when new parents are already vulnerable.

As I already alluded to, we experienced a lot of this anxiety with our eldest. Due to the nature of the birth and some poor feeding advice given to us in hospital, she dropped over 10% of her weight in her first week, which put us on a pathway of more regular weigh-ins (because parents who are anxious about their baby’s weight need more stress flashpoints in their life, right?). We got seen by all kinds of people, many with conflicting advice. Some told my wife to pump throughout the day as well as feed, then give whatever milk she pumped in a feeding cup after each feed. Another told us in polite terms that this was bollocks, and that whatever was pumped should be saved up until the end of the day to give in a bottle (this is the option that worked for us in the end). Despite fluctuations in weight and it taking a good few weeks before she was back on her centile line, there was never anything that even the most experienced of breastfeeding nurses we saw could suggest to change about my wife’s feeding technique, which added to the frustration all the more, and made us worry that it was something wrong with our daughter.

With our second, my wife was able to make a running start with feeding, and it took right away. Despite this, the baby still came close to a 10% loss—which is to be expected. She was back to birth weight within two weeks; perhaps if this was our first experience with the weight race, then maybe we wouldn’t have had any anxieties about it, and would have just been able to trust the process. But the experience with our eldest made us overthink each in weigh-in with our second, and it brought back a lot of old memories of difficult times.

I don’t want you or anyone to think I’m bashing weighing babies, or having a go at health professionals that we saw—a lot of close family of mine work in healthcare, and I know the good they do under really shitty circumstances. All I’m saying is that it’s the expectations set around baby’s weight by wider society that cause our stress. We can get so entranced by the percentiles and growth charts and see them as this prescribed way for our baby to grow, and if they deviate off their line for even a day, then there’s something wrong with either our parenting or their health.

But those percentile lines give a great tolerance for weight fluctuations that can be caused by a great myriad of factors. They take into account that babies will take their own time to get to where they need to be weight-wise. To think that each unique, individually-created child will conform to a chart written by some paediatricians in the early 2000’s is to set very prescriptive expectations of yourself and your baby, and it’s setting you up to fail.

Example of a percentile chart—something that parents who’ve been through scale anxiety will be all too familiar with

Another thing that some concern themselves about is what particular line their child is following. In our experience, at one point our eldest was following the 25th centile line. At first, we took this as a failure—why couldn’t we get our child onto the 50th, or 75th instead?

This was an incredibly harsh view for us to take with ourselves. A child being on the 75th centile does not make them healthier or “better” than a child on the 50th centile—that’s just the particular trajectory that the baby happens to be on. It’s even normal for children to change centile lines during their first three years of life, so these lines, whilst based on good data, should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt, and should not dictate our opinions of our parenting ability.

Every baby’s growth and development journey—whether that’s weight in the early days, or developmental milestones later on—is entirely unique, so embrace it. Run your own race.

By all means, take the advice your healthcare provider gives you based on the weights they take, but unless they express genuine concerns, take heart from two parents who’ve been through the depths of weight anxiety, and learnt that all babies get to where they need to be. Your hard work doing those night feeds will be rewarded, I promise. These charts are not meant to be analysed over the course of days and weeks, but months and years.

For now, in the early days, spend your precious mental energy on your child’s overall contentedness, and how you’re all settling in as a family unit. This is something you can have a far greater effect on, and that will trickle down and positively affect every other aspect of your early parenting journey.

Time for you to weigh in!

(I’m sorry)

Is scale anxiety something that affected you as a new parent? Are you currently staring at your child’s centiles and stressing about where they’re plotting? I’d love to hear from you.

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Evolving Fatherhood

I’ve been asked by

Beck Delahoy

from

Lessons Learned

to examine the societal factors that are placed in the way of dads who want to show up and do their part, as well as how the role of fatherhood is changing for the better. You can read the first part of Evolving Fatherhood here:

Evolving Fatherhood: Part I